Area Man Feels Google Is 'Watching' Him, Sets Street View Cars on Fire to Fix That

Raul Diaz has some privacy concerns when it comes to Google. The 30-year-old Oakland man's response was not to call his congressman or hit up Change.org, however. Instead, he allegedly elected to hunt down the Google Street View cars patrolling his area and set them on fire.

According toThe Guardian, Diaz was arrested after reports of a string of attacks on Google vehicles since May, including an incident when Molotov cocktails were hurled at a Street View car in Mountain View, California. In another incident, police responded to a call of shots fired on a Google facility. Authorities say a black SUV model was caught by surveillance cameras near the scene in both incidents, and that it's similar to the one they arrested Diaz in outside a Google building on June 30.

GettyDaniel Mihailescu

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On that occasion, Diaz had a device identified as a half-finished pipe bomb in his vehicle. A few weeks earlier, he was arrested at an entirely separate traffic stop. In an affidavit from that case, The Guardian reports, police say he "shared information about previous events unrelated to the traffic stop [and] mentioned Google, Facebook and Larry Page [the chief executive of Alphabet, Google's parent company]."

He also "told officers that his motivation behind the attacks was that he felt Google was watching him and that made him upset. Diaz said that he kept journals of the times that he felt Google had been watching him." No one has been reported injured in the incidents.

While Google has courted controversy on privacy issues on both sides of the Atlantic—and faced repeated litigation over it—guerrilla warfare on the streets of Northern California hardly seems like the best remedy.